Diablo II: Lord of Destruction vs Grand Theft Auto III vs Halo: Combat Evolved vs Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2009
Results Round One Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 Ulti's Analysis This is the best possible match you could ask for in a fourway format. All 4 games close early, all 4 games breaking 20% late and all four games taking awhile to establish anything on one another. The general consensus here was Halo and Diablo 2 getting some order of 1-2, with Grand Theft Auto 3 still having some people retain faith in the series. No one really expected anything of KOTOR while sharing a poll with fellow Xbox smash hit Halo. Little did we know how awesome this poll would be. When it started, all four games were virtually dead even for a few minutes, with GTA3 straggling behind a bit. It would fall behind pace relatively quickly, and by the 30 minute mark it was clearly not going to threaten a second place finish. It obviously still ended up doing extremely well for a last place game, and it even managed to shave a 700 vote deficit down to 250 with the dead hours, and threatened to steal third place for a time. If you used Vice City's 2004 performance to gauge Grand Theft Auto 3, I guess one could call GTA3 a disappointment here. Its sales and critical acclaim (once upon a time, GTA was actually a good series; now Rock$* just rehashes GTA3 with different color tones and the fans eat it up like drones) should have meant it doing better than it showed here, but it was simply not to be. GTA has fallen off the map more and more with each passing year on this site, though I won't trash 3's performance in this match. It helped create one of the best fourway scenarios possible. The true match however took place between Halo and KOTOR. Even though this poll is close in percentage, Diablo 2 established control of first place within 30 minutes and did about as well as a game can do in a close match. After the first freeze, it never lost the lead and shocked casual and Board 8 bracketmaker alike with its first place finish. Diablo 2 placing wasn't a giant surprise to the Board 8 people, but outdoing Starcraft and scoring first place was. Its first place prediction percentage was 18.7%, and partial was 15.05%, one of the lowest of the entire first round. Part of this was casual underestimation (Diablo 2 being stronger than Starcraft was a HUGE leap of faith given 2004), but most of it is Halo time and time again being the most overbracketed series we'll ever have. Everyone always picks Halo stuff to go far every contest, and every contest it falls flat on its face. Which at last brings us to one of the most surprising performances of the entire contest. Can anyone look at this poll and honestly tell me expanding character battles to all fictional gaming characters is a bad idea? Star Wars KOTOR not only performed well, but it performed well in the face of two fanbases -- PC and Xbox -- that should have stolen all its votes and sent it packing to an easy last place. The reason for this is inexplicable to me, unless the name "Star Wars" really means that much. And putting Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker in a contest would be a bad idea? Are you kidding me? I'm all for it. Halo actually spent the first 90 minutes of this match struggling to build a 200 vote lead, but it all fell apart overnight. Star Wars came all the way back during the dead hours, built a small lead, tailed off a bit in the morning and built up a 700 vote lead during the DSV. Halo predictably made a furious comeback with the ASV and won second place (and even cut its deficit on Diablo 2 down to 1900 after trailing by something like 2600-2700 votes), but this was a rare comeback where I didn't notice too much whining. Halo's ASV is well-documented by now, so people saw it coming well before it happened. However everyone was so surprised and happy by Star Wars' initial effort that they didn't mind the end result loss too much. Threatening second place in the face of two stronger games from your two main fanbases is an unbelievable effort, and one of the most commendable results of the entire contest. You won't find many 0-2 games more impressive than Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. For Halo, despite the win and my risking a broken record here, casual shooters were bombing all over the place. This was a bomb regardless of it winning; if you're Halo, you don't rely on a monster ASV to come back on a weaker game from your own system. You just don't. This was one of the most embarrassing contest wins I can remember. On a more personal note, Diablo 2 winning kicks all sorts of ass. It took me forever to get into online, but I did eventually get hooked. How I have two level 90 characters (Hammerdin and Meteorb Sorceress), but I might sell all my stuff on d2jsp given the impending ladder reset. Anyway, awesome to see Diablo 2 get its due. This was an amazing result. Match Trends Ngamer's Same Day Analysis Match Prediction This seemed like a fairly easy poll to predict not so long ago, but after the wild events of the last 5 days anyone who tells you they have ANY kind of confidence in ANY of the possible results here is a bald faced liar! (Or perhaps an honest lunatic.) Quick hitters: * I'm seeing pretty high Halo picks for this one over in the Oracle, but I'm not buying it. This is a terrible draw for Halo; its against one of the two or so alternative Xbox games that people actually care about, and on top of that casual/frat boy split between itself GTA3 is going to hurt it plenty. Now granted we said the same thing about Master Chief and Vercetti and couple years back, but that was Steroid MC- I think the '08 version would have been held back more like we expected. * Because of the forementioned overlap I also don't think GTA3 runs away with anything here, not even after today's very impressive showing for VC. Although it IS the only PS2 option, and with how crazy hot that system has been all week... yeah, it's going to look very good and improve on VC's percentage, but the trouble is... * I don't think there's anyway Diablo loses to GTA in a close match. And since Halo will be weakening it a little and people actually care about KotoR somewhat, there probably won't be enough percentage to go around for GTA to blow past DII with ease, which could take us back to a Warcraft/GTA situation. Also, despite all the calls of FLOP, SC did still manage over 28% of the vote- Diablo doesn't even need to do that in order to pull out a second place here. So with that in mind I'm taking a 0.000000% confidence pick of: * Halo - 30.91% * Diablo II: Lord of Destruction - 26.76% * Grand Theft Auto III - 26.72% * Knights of the Old Republic - 15.61% ...wait a minute, did I just pick Diabo > GTA not three hours after stating that Warcraft > GTA was making less and less sense every minute? What was I THINING? Next Day Review Oh man, what an entertaining match that was! I mean, just check out the final graph (listed above). Flat out insane trends, especially from Halo which pulled the closest thing I've ever seen to a perfect horizontal "S curve"- look at it go absolutely dead to rights in Europe before exploding once the American teenagers started hitting the polls. I mean obviously we've seen this kind of thing before from Halo/MC, but this time it was especially powerful thanks to Diablo being the complete polar opposite. Jeez DII, from dominating the next closest competitor by over 6% overnight to finishing dead last in a couple updates during the day! Too bad that the loser in all this excitement had to be the one entrant that was consistently impressive throughout the entire day... check out that straight as an arrow trend for KotOR. Now there's a fanbase you could set your watch to! Too bad that, like Donkey Kong (and unlike Frog and Sub-Zero) before him it just didn't QUITE have what it took to pull off the hilarious upset. And of course the most stunning result has to be GTA3. How in the world do you manage to flop this badly in a poll with no Nintendo, and no Square, and where you're the only Playstation option? The craziest part is that the game did terribly the first couple hours (as expected), but then did very well in Europe and actually held up quite decently during the day, yet somehow got SFFed entirely to death within the fanbase that's supposed to be its #1 lifeline, the American teens. I mean true, last night I predicted Halo would hurt GTA's casual/frat boy appeal, but even I didn't think it would break its legs off like THAT. (Also, props to this poll for being one of the more popular ones so far this season despite the major 'no Squintendo' disadvantage. And the added disadvantage of none of these games actually being strong... but shh about that, don't ruin the mood!) Trivia *Diablo II's 27.43% was the lowest percentage ever put up by a first-place finisher in a four-way battle, breaking the record of 27.79% set by Liquid Snake in 2007. *Likewise, GTA III broke Kefka's record for highest percentage received by a fourth-place finisher. *Neither of these records lasted very long, though. External Links * Match Updates * Guru Match Predictions * Oracle Match Results • Previous Match • Next Match Category:2009 Spring Contest Matches